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One of the tattiest cliches in the book reviewing dodge is to say that the book under study "works on many levels," even when it doesn't. This is to show that the reviewer is a Deep Thinker, able to see things that even the author didn't, and au courant with modish reviewese.
It isn't exactly the same thing, though admittedly it is sailing pretty close to the same wind, to say that a book is many things at once -- which, taking my Deep Thinker's courage firmly in my hands, is what I say about Starling Lawrence's first novel, "Montenegro." That can be taken as a sign of its excellence, because if it were one thing and one thing only, it could be dealt with in a few paragraphs. You can't do that with a novel that's a historical spy thriller love story, especially when it isn't quite any of those things. Ambiguity, always ambiguity.
Lawrence (editor-in-chief at W.W. Norton, who last year published his "Legacies," a collection of short stories) seems to have absorbed his research well and created an effective sense of the novel's place and times, the Balkans in 1908. The spy thriller contains, as all spy thrillers should, murkiness and jeopardy in equal parts. And the love story is tender enough to make us cheer on the hesitant lovers yet believable enough not to feel foolish about doing so.
What is Auberon Harwell, a young Englishman, doing in this wild, rugged country so dark and scary that we wouldn't be surprised at the next turn on a mountain path to see Lon Chaney Jr. barking at the moon? It is hard to say. Ostensibly he is collecting flora for a certain Lord Polgrove in London, though even Harwell suspects that he is recording data more foreboding than mountain plants. What Harwell only suspects, everyone else, in this vortex of international intrigue, knows. Because the region is unstable: The Ottoman Empire's hold on it is weakening and being replaced by the long arm of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The sinister Polgrove sees only advantage for Britain in meddling in this instability.
Add to this the nationalist aspirations of Montenegro's Serbs and you have quite a stew indeed, a stew that is still simmering today, though the cooks may be slightly different.
The Montenegrins want neither Turkish nor Austrian oppression. They are represented here chiefly by Danilo Pekocevic, a fierce patriot who has lost a leg and two sons to the interminable blood feuds and religious hatreds of the region. His bitter hope is that his remaining son, Toma, will in his turn take up these feuds and hatreds as his own.
Danilo's beautiful wife, Sofia, however, wants Toma to flee this madness, to go to Chicago where her cousin lives and perhaps eventually become an engineer. In this project she enlists the knowledge and help of Harwell, easily achieved as he has fallen in love with her.
That brings us to the heart of the novel: the battle over Toma's fate. Harwell says as much in a letter to Lydia Wadham, a young English woman teaching at a girls' school in a nearby town: "It is true that I am somewhat uncomfortably placed between Danilo and Sofia, a kind of fulcrum in their struggle for the soul of Toma."
Harwell's growing attraction to Lydia forms the central love story of the novel, though Harwell's unexpressed love for the older Sofia is actually stronger. But a frightful calamity ends that relationship (which was unlikely to go far, anyway), just as another calamity ends a love affair between Toma and a Muslim girl named Aliye.
Calamity, in fact, is the order of the day from there on out. An earthquake strikes, during which Toma exacts a gruesome retribution on the haughty Austrian captain who had brutalized him. All that remains after that is for Harwell to embark on a perilous adventure to schlep the half-dead Toma out of the mountains, past the border guards, and onto a ship for America.
The book itself ends rather happily, even sentimentally, if -- again -- ambiguously. For the true ending, though, you may want to go back and re-read the prologue, set in Connecticut in 1988. You probably will have forgotten what it told you about the ultimate fates of many of these characters that you were, to your unforeseen gratification, about to meet.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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